Cladding

Pictures to follow, but I made some progress on cladding the torso with plasti-card last night. It could be a pain to fill the edges, but once done will make the Dreadnought look quite beefy. The initial fill went quite well and I filed down some of that, though ran out of time to do a second fill, which is a bit of a pain. I need to get the leg assembly finished by the end of the weekend to stand a chance of hitting my deadline.

The actual plasti-card was easier to cut than I’d anticipated, which is good. The textured card I simply cut partially through on the plain side and then folded to snap complete the cut. I’ve glued the plain top pieces on which need to be trimmed tonight and then I can glue on the textured cladding onto the front. As with the filling, I’m having to do everything in small controlled stages, in this case to allow the glue to set hard before taking a knife/file to it. Annoyingly this just makes the whole construction process drawn out and lengthly, although I’m happy with the result that I’m achieving. I’ve decided that I’m going to edge most of the armour and will be using 1.5mm plastic strip for this purpose. I think that I’ll have to flatten the surface of the textured plasti-card in order to do this, but the end result should look quite nice and importantly neat. I’m hoping that I can rivet along this strip and as such make it look like it’s actually part and parcel of the model and not a bit of stuck on plastic.

I’m currently toying with the idea of only cladding one shoulder (the close combat arm), and instead edging the other shoulder with a deeper plastic strip and doing some kind of feature on the flat surface. This will either be a wolf skull cut from either a metal banner top or one of the space wolf icons, or filigree made with fine wire, or a mixture of both. Thinking about it I could actually partly sculpt something onto a piece of plasticard cut to the right shape and then stick this on as its own assembly, it would mean that if I messed anything up I could start all over again.

Flicking through the Horus Heresy art book that I have, one thing that has become more apparent is that most decoration on the armour of the Space Wolves in there is 3d, in other words it’s thing ‘stuck’ on, rather than flowing freehand. The only odd exception seems to be a rune here and there. It means that I should avoid freehand on the bulk of the miniature as it’s just going to be out of place. I did come across one cool image of a Space Wolf scout that had a paw print painted onto his face, which is quite cool.

I also need to increase the number of studs that I was thinking about using – in the artwork of Bjorn his lightening claw is quite litterally festooned with spikes and pyramid shaped studs. I’ll put up a scan of the image at some point, as it’s going to be a good point of reference on how well the grey and brass colours work together.